7 - A Crip Chronotope: Time, Disability, and Heimat in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Die Wupper

Summary

ON NOVEMBER 6, 1958, a production of Else Lasker-Schüler's Die Wupper (The Wupper, 1909; published in English as Dark River, 2005)—the first one since before the Second World War—opened in Cologne, to a reception that was not merely lukewarm but downright cold. Righteously indignant audience members walked out, the archdiocese called for the play to close, and Lasker-Schüler's gritty ode to her hometown of Wuppertal disappeared from the theater's repertoire after less than three weeks. One review in particular, despite the critic's very apparent dislike for the play, highlights the qualities that make Die Wupper a piece like no other, and one for which Cologne was definitely not ready:

Else Lasker-Schüler spent her childhood in Elberfeld on the Wupper… . She loved the environment of her childhood days, even when it was distorted, dirty, and run-down. In her play Die Wupper, more than twenty such people surface, as she had seen and loved them back then in Elberfeld, poor ones and rich ones, pious ones and hypocritical ones, dyers, factory workers, curious little girls, and also Rosa, the fat lady from the carnival, homeless drifters and an old matchmaker who reads cards. That is a colorful mix of people from the carousel of life, scattered across the boards without a plan, plucked from Gerhart Hauptmann and shadowed by Ibsen, but still all its own.

In this description, the reviewer draws attention to three elements that distinguish the play's dramaturgy as something “all its own”: its place (a gritty, realistic Wuppertal), its time (seemingly unplanned and disordered, yet carousel-like), and its people (both beloved and remarkably heterogeneous). In other words, the critic describes what might be called the play's chronotope, or its particular mode of representing the world and its inhabitants via interconnected time and space.

The figures in that chronotope are truly a “colorful mix” of qualities that deviate from the normate: Lasker-Schüler's Wuppertalers are aged, fat, homeless, unemployed, poor, queer, disabled, promiscuous, and the list goes on. While it may not be obvious at first glance that traits like joblessness and queerness share a common history, each of the qualities in that cast of characters has links with disability. For one, eugenic ideology viewed all of them as “undesirable” and, more importantly, heritable traits, thus turning many non-physical deviations from the norm into markers of biological difference and disability.